Eastern Occultism Is the Parent Stream of Inner Wisdom

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages carrying an editorial note, first published in The Theosophist volume III number 3, December 1881, pages 81 to 82, and republished in the Collected Writings volume III. It answers an article Gerald Massey contributed to Light — Massey's own life is told in a separate file in this section — in which he asked for more information about the elementals.

Blavatsky summarises his position fairly before disagreeing with it: he asks for further information about elementals, suggests they may be what spiritualists would call the spirits of deceased animals, offers this as a new idea for Eastern philosophers to consider, and points out that adepts privileged to read Darwin might, with their peculiar powers of clairvoyance, have detected in the elementals shapes identifiable as the remains of man's imperfectly developed ancestors. Her reply is patient rather than dismissive — the comprehension of what occult science really is has spread in Europe so imperfectly, she says, that one must not be impatient even with a curiously entangled view of the subject. What follows is the passage the file exists for, and it is a general observation about how people learn rather than a point about elementals. European mystics, further advanced in the tedious study of unintelligible books, are hardest to persuade that they must go back some distance along the path they have travelled before they can strike into the one that leads to fully illuminated regions; they are naturally loth to confess that much time has been wasted, and so they try to make the fragments of esoteric Eastern philosophy they pick up here and there fit the vacant places in the scheme they have painfully constructed for themselves — and when the fragments will not fit, they think the corners want paring down and the hollows filling up. The situation the European mystic does not realise, she concludes, is that Eastern occult philosophy is the great block of solid truth from which the quaint exoteric mysticism of the outer world has been thrown off from time to time in veiled and symbolic shapes.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.5 MB, 9 pages)